Defining Your Requirements

The first big step in planning a deployment is determining which features you plan to support. This greatly influences the overall design, has a big impact on server roles that are deployed, and affects infrastructure services such as the LAN and the WAN.

If you plan to enable web conferencing, which includes both document and application sharing, account for the following:

• Enable conferencing for the Front End pool in the Topology Builder.

• Account for increased network usage for application sharing. The default throttling is 1.5KB/sec for each session and can be modified as needed.

• Build custom meeting policies if there is a need to enable either application sharing or document collaboration but a desire to prevent the other.

To enable audio and video conferencing, which in this type of deployment includes PC-to-PC calls but not PBX integration, plan for the following tasks:

• Enable conferencing for the Front End pool in the Topology Builder.

• Account for increased network usage, typically 50Kbps for audio and 350Kbps for video. Note that increased bandwidth is required for high-definition (HD) video.

If requirements include supporting external users connecting to internally hosted conferences, consider the following tasks:

• Deploy Edge Servers in the topology.

• Properly protect access to the Edge Servers.

• Properly resolve the meeting URLs externally.

• Be sure users trust the certificates used on the Edge Servers to establish SSL connections.

• Decide whether federation will be supported.

Another decision that must be accounted for is whether it is necessary to support legacy clients on Lync Server 2013. Each time a client connects, its version is checked and compared against policies to determine whether it can be used. Web-based connections attempt to detect a local client and always offer the option of the web-based client. This is an important decision because there are compatibility limitations between various clients and backends. In general, a newer client is not supported talking to an older server version, and it is a best practice to avoid this situation.